One great moment I almost forgot about from the house painting process:

The side supports for our front steps had been coming apart for years and were in pretty terrible shape:

This was not the great moment.

Eventually, of course, we’d love to redo the front steps in a beautiful way, and also redo the sloping path to the sidewalk to match. I have a Pinterest board full of inspiration ideas like this one for that project, but unfortunately ours was a budget of realism already stretched, rather than Pinterest dreams.

So, since this poor beat-up little side support and its twin are actually not at all load-bearing or important to the house’s structure, we were thrilled when our painter offered to just clear out the rotted bits, frame up a little piece of wood inside, and patch it all back together so at least things looked whole again.

Aside from the dead February landscaping, much better I think! Thank you, enterprising painter!

But the great discovery was what he pulled out when he was rebuilding it: a piece of the original trim boards, painted a vivid emerald green!

We even joked about its similarity of the Pantone 2013 color of the year, Emerald.

It’s fun to imagine what this house must have looked like, long ago, before the stucco, with its pea green siding (discovered during the chimney rebuild in 2008) and this emerald green trim. Maybe something like this? Oh for a crystal ball.

Other house colors we discovered along the way were mostly in the white-cream-tan-yellow-orange family one would traditionally expect with stucco around here. Here are a few shots we got along the way:

Trim colors through the years:

House body colors (on top of the stucco – the green was all under it) through the years:

And just as a reminder, here’s what it all looked like before and after our most recent paint job.

When we bought this house back in 2008, the exterior color – especially the dark trim color – was definitely a negative. Everyone says you have to learn as a prospective buyer to “look past” the paint colors, and everyone is pretty much right. Here’s what it looked like way back then, on our very first visit.

Mostly pretty dark grey

In some lights (this was a warm sunset time of day) more brown?

The paint wasn’t in great shape at that point, though it was mostly fine, but then we bought it and moved in and did other things and all of a sudden five years and five winters happened, which of course deteriorated it further:

By this point though, we had finally saved up enough to start getting estimates from local painters. We had 3 different people come out who were recommended by neighbors, friends, and the owner of our local Benjamin Moore paint store. We preferred having a single person or small company do the work rather than a bigger crew, even though it would take longer. In the end, we didn’t choose the lowest estimate, but we chose the person who seemed the most interested in our house, the one who took the most photos, had the most ideas, and wrote up the most detailed estimate. He really seemed to care about the house, and getting things right. When the project is all completed, I’m hopeful we’ll feel we made the right choice. I certainly feel that way so far.

So the first step was deciding on colors. We enjoyed playing for a long time with the Benjamin Moore Personal Color Viewer online, which lets you preview different colors on your actual photos of your home. After a few days of flinking around there, we had a few top contenders, but of course you can’t know for sure until you see a few painted on your actual house, with your texture, your light situation, etc. Still it was fun and gave us some ideas.

Mostly it gave me the idea that white trim was going to make a big, big difference.

Admittedly, these are a little cartoony. (Especially note how I sort of “invented” a front right pillar there in front of our bushes, but then left the back pillar half hidden.) Oh well! It gave us somewhere to start.

And start we did. Time to get some paint on these walls!

And time to start writing checks. Unlike Home Depot or Lowe’s, it seems like the more professional paint retailers (in our town, this is limited to Benjamin Moore and Sherwin Williams) don’t mix you up those charming $3 small sample pots of paint. I’m sure they have great reasons, but it was kind of a bummer for my tightwad soul to have to pay for a whole quart of paint ($20+) in each color we wanted to preview. It definitely made us more disciplined about narrowing down our choices somewhat, although of course in terms of the larger house project, the price of an extra sample quart or two would end up seeming pretty small. Good first lesson in the process. 🙂

A few weird things we felt we had to factor in to our color decision:

The stucco texture on our house is very lumpy and shows a lot of contrast between the high and low spots because it gets full sun for most of the day. We didn’t want too light of a color because we felt it made the contrast even more noticeable.

Stucco, especially textured stucco, seems to look best (or least weird we think) when it’s painted some type of earth tone. We didn’t want it to completely blend in with green grass, or brown mulch, or tan/grey winter-dead-landscaping around it, but we also felt like some of the more “fun” colors we were attracted to (especially blues and greys) looked like they weren’t right for stucco. Sad but true.

The houses on either side of us are lighter — the one on the left is white smooth stucco with red wood trim and the one on the right is a cream-color siding with white trim. So if we went a bit darker with our color (and white with the trim) it seemed like it would be a nice counterpoint to the neighbors’ house, rather than going very pale and having 3 very pale houses in a row.

In the end when we saw them on the house, the decision wasn’t hard.

Pismo Dunes was too pale – it looked almost exactly like the previous color!

It also “washed out” too much next to the white trim, especially in the places the house gets more sun (this photo was taken under the porch roof’s shade.

Kingsport Grey was promising, but seemed just slightly TOO grey, and we wanted to be careful not to let our stucco start to read as “lumpy drips of concrete” instead. Caldwell Green was fun and I actually loved the idea of it next to crisp white trim, but unfortunately the color change from our previous tan/pink to Caldwell Green would have required 2 coats of paint to cover adequately, where all the other colors we chose could do it in one coat. Doubling the paint budget went RIGHT out, especially because the color seemed just a tiny bit too bold in person anyway, to us.

So in the end, the winner for our exterior stucco color was Mesa Verde Tan (AC-33), which had the nice midtone color intensity of the Kingsport Grey but with a warmer, browner tone to it. I had thought it might be too dark, but especially in bright sun it really seemed like a nice happy medium. And it’s definitely dark ENOUGH to make the new white trim, which is actually Benjamin Moore Bavarian Cream (OC-123), stand out bright and clean and hog all the attention, which is kind of what I think it has always wanted to do.

What do you think? 🙂

It’s not done yet, but the front is getting toward being done, and we are definitely excited about how it is looking so far.

Other colors involved: Porch floor is the Ben Moore premixed porch and floor paint in Rich Brown, though we may still want to go greyer for the second coat it needs anyway, and the porch ceiling – in a small nod to the “haint blue” of beautiful Southern porches I have loved on our travels, is Benjamin Moore Blue Hydrangea (2062-60).

It’s amazing how much brighter things feel — even just from having a lighter porch ceiling the front rooms get more reflected light during the day.

More updates soon as we finalize front door decisions! I can hardly wait for a true “before and after” this time, believe me.

We’ve been planning a little summer get-together to celebrate our house’s big centennial this summer. I’ve had a good time beginning to plan a few things for it, and researching some of the food, music, and styles of 1910.

It’s probably not news to anyone who reads this blog that ApartmentTherapy.com is a great place for home decorating inspiration. But I’m usually out of luck there since so much of it is modern and geared toward small spaces. Like I wrote about before, we kind of have the opposite problem. But this recent post really spoke to what I’d like our place to feel like one day:

The photo gallery is really phenomenal. It might take us YEARS to get close to that feeling, especially considering our DIY budget, but it’s good to know what it might kind of look like when we finally get there. 🙂

This was a drive-by photo, obviously, but the texture was the same lumpy stucco as ours and I liked how this color worked on it. To compare, click here to see my entry on other color scheme I have seen and thought looked nice on this, our very uncooperative texture.